Hearthstone

The newest Hearthstone expansion "Mean Streets of Gadgetzan" is almost upon us. First to play will be the players from North America and they can start building their decks today (1st December). Tavern adventurers from Europe have to wait one more day to see their packs from pre-order unlocked. Except the new expansion with its 132 cards, there are some other upcoming changes as well such as new quests, new cardbacks and more.

But let's focus on Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. Lots of players have had enough after facing yet another shaman on ladder and they hope that the new cards and mechanics will bring a lot of exciting changes to the metagame, and we are certainly among them.

One of those new mechanics is the introduction of a Tri-class card system which allows you to put specific cards only into specific heroes' decks, matching their gang family. Gadgetzan is ruled by the Kabal, the Jade Lotus and the Grimy Goons. The expansion features 9 tri-class cards in total, including 3 legendaries (1 for each family).

The Grimy Goons mechanic which is available for Hunter, Paladin and Warrior, is based on buffing cards in your own hand. Their tri-class cards are the following:

Some of the new class cards are also based on those buffs like the Warrior card Stolen Goods which can improve a Taunt card in your hand by +3/+3. Just imagine that dream start as a Warrior where you have the coin and Fiery War Axe, Stolen Goods and Fierce Monkey. On turn 3 you probably have a clean board on your opponent's side and a 6/7 minion with taunt on yours. Or you start with Stolen Goods and the new Warrior card Public Defender and the coin in your hand. On the 2nd turn you have a 3/10 minion with taunt. Against those combos I can only say "farewell aggro decks". The Grimy Goons cards will most likely bring us a lot of tempo and midrange decks.

The Jade Lotus family is what has the potential to drastically change the metagame. New cards can summon a very weak Jade Golem at the beginning or a very powerful finisher in the late game. Cards from this family can be used in Druid, Rogue or Shaman decks. The multi-class cards for them look as follows:

Jade Golem is a card that buffs every subsequent copy that is summoned. For example the first golem has 1/1 stats and costs 1 mana. Every subsequent has +1/+1 stats up to 30/30 (10 mana cost). At first sight this mechanic looks like a huge metagame swing. But in reality a golem with 30/30 stats is almost impossible and there are a lot of removal cards that can deal with big minions. It seems similar to C'thun decks. Just after The Old Gods release there were a lot of decks based on this card but when the meta got stable it looked like everyone forgot about it except C'thun Warrior which was a middle of the pack deck. Considering AKAWonder was one of the first to start using it, it could once again be one of our players bringing us a deck that will exceed our expectations for the new mechanic.

Last but not least, the third family from Gadgetzan is Kabal. It's designed for Mage, Priest and Warlock and the new neutral cards for those 3 classes are:

Kabal's cards are based on different spells and potions. Finally we can say that Priest is coming to town with some really strong cards. The new legendary class card for Anduin (or Tyrande) looks very powerful. As we can see, Kabal's classes will favor mostly Reno decks. First that comes to mind for Priest is some combination for a Reno Dragon Priest. For more details about how the meta will change for this class we will have to wait for Zetalot and see what decks he will bring to us.

The new Hearthstone update also brings us some new quests which will reward Gadgetzan packs: